Members of the Grateful Dead are to tour with John Mayer. Billboard reports that three of the Dead’s "core four" players - guitarist Bob Weir and drummers Mickey Hart and Bill Kreutzmann - will go out as Dead & Company, with John Mayer on guitar. Uncut first reported rumours this was afoot b...
Members of the Grateful Dead are to tour with John Mayer.
Billboard reports that three of the Dead’s “core four” players – guitarist Bob Weir and drummers Mickey Hart and Bill Kreutzmann – will go out as Dead & Company, with John Mayer on guitar.
Uncut first reported rumours this was afoot back in May.
Dead & Company’s first appearance will be on October 31 at New York’s Madison Square Garden – the site of more than 50 Grateful Dead shows.
Tickets for the New York show go on sale on Friday, August 14 and cost between $75 – $99.
The Dead & Company announcement comes shortly after the Grateful Dead’s run of five sold-out shows earlier this summer, billed as Fare Thee Well.
You can read our report about the Fare Thee Well anniversary shows by clicking here.
“Those songs weren’t done with us,” Bob Weir explained to Billboard. “It was a matter of who wanted to get back out on the road and keep doing it.” Mayer’s enthusiasm, he adds, “was the cherry on the sundae that made this project look like a good idea.”
Added Bill Kreutzmann, “When we first started playing years ago, it was with Pig Pen, and he was nothing but a blues guy. We took that and made it into the Grateful Dead and we’re doing that with John. And John gets to open up to many styles and doesn’t have to be locked into any one genre. And I think that’s why John is excited to play with us because we offer up a whole new cookie. He’s told me that he’s been at home working on our material like crazy. He’ll be one of us.”
Says Mickey Hart: “All the pieces just fell together magically. There was a kind of serendipity there – when you’re not actually looking for anything and then all of a sudden, it all appears.”
In addition to Mayer, Dead & Company will feature the Allman Brothers’ Oteil Burbridge on bass and keyboardist Jeff Chimenti, who played on the recent Fare Thee Well shows.
The band have launched a website: http://deadandcompany.com/.
Meanwhile, Uncut‘s current issue, dated September 2015, contains a free Grateful Dead CD: our historic attempt to piece together the album that should have followed “Workingman’s Dead” and “American Beauty”…
In other Dead news, Uncut has been hosting a series of online exclusives, previewing unheard tracks from the band’s forthcoming 30 Trips Around The Sun set. Click here to listen to our latest exclusive: an unreleased version of “Scarlet Begonias”.
The History Of Rock – a brand new monthly magazine from the makers of Uncut – a brand new monthly magazine from the makers of Uncut – is now on sale in the UK. Click here for more details.
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